Amusing, heartfelt and emotionally sophisticated chick-lit.
The dreaded move back home offers an opportunity for personal reinvention in this agreeable tale.
At 28, Meredith McKay has a job she doesn’t hate, a boyfriend she likes just fine and a nice little life far, far from her dysfunctional family. This pleasant existence is interrupted when a medical emergency—her father breaks his leg while her mother tours Europe—requires an extended stay at her childhood home. Always the responsible one, Meredith tends to her father while keeping the peace between her siblings and maintaining a truce with her brother’s fiancée—who happens to be her former best friend. Her father’s convalescence provides her with ample opportunity to rediscover her teen angst and deal with the fact that caring for him in the home she thought she’d escaped doesn’t compare at all favorably to caring for her boyfriend in the home she’s created for herself. In any case, the reader can be certain that Meredith will soon be jolted from her housewifely tendencies altogether. When a young, female protagonist rhapsodizes about her “comfortable routine,” you know her world is about to get rocked. Unrest arrives in the form of Scott Sheridan, a dweeb from her youth who has grown into a disarmingly handsome man. The reunion culminates in crazed sexual shenanigans, which Scott perceives as payment for various tortures Meredith and her clique inflicted on him in high school. The ensuing relationship—all snarky banter and passive-aggressive sex—is pure passion sublimated, straight out of a romantic comedy. This is not to say that the story is utterly predictable. While Crane (English as a Second Language, 2004) follows the rules of the genre when it comes to love, she affords her heroine considerable latitude for growth, and she addresses real challenges—connecting with an imperfect family, making and keeping girlfriends, achieving true self-awareness—faced by young women.
Amusing, heartfelt and emotionally sophisticated chick-lit.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-69433-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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